


What It Means to Survive

by jenaicompris



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Auntie Sole, F/M, Friends to Lovers, I seriously have a problem with this whole older man/younger woman thing, Nerdy robot engineer, Science-y, Smarty-pants sole, Talk Nerdy To Me, ghoul love, horde of ferals, stuck on a rooftop
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-06
Updated: 2017-02-05
Packaged: 2018-09-22 09:09:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9599825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jenaicompris/pseuds/jenaicompris
Summary: Harper Lexington, the younger sister of lawyer Nora, ends up in the cryo pod and waking up some two centuries in the future of the apocalyptic wasteland known as the Commonwealth. After meeting a certain ghoulishly handsome mayor, they find themselves in a pickle atop an old gas station. AU of an AU, Harper is Shaun's aunt instead of mother, more is explained inside.





	

**Author's Note:**

> These things just pop into my head, there's nothing I can do about it. Harper was initially created for Nick Valentine (I'm still working on the story for that one, but it's started!) but she fit so well into this idea that it happened anyway. I have been on a The Fuxedos/Danny Shorago/Hancock kick the last few days. This was supposed to be a shooting practice one-shot but...uhhh...what can I say? I can't resist that voice. Anyhoo. Hope you enjoy! Smut in the next chapter.

Harper grunted, a noise she felt like she made far more in the After than she ever had before - or maybe the relative silence that came with no planes, or cars, or even with so few people left made it easier for her to recognize the sound that left her mouth. She plopped onto the roof of the old gas station and winced at the creak it made. She hoped it was just coincidence. Hancock stood over her with a sour expression on his face, hat tipped back just a little from his forehead as he looked at the predicament spread out in front of them.

They had gotten trapped inside the old Red Rocket station on the south end of Boston, surrounded by far too many ferals to survive without a miracle.

That miracle came in the form of an empty and easily barricaded gas station, a ladder to the roof that they could take with them, and a well-stocked backpack. The roof gave them cover from the elements by way of a broken-down shack of some sort, probably used for storage when there were people to bother storing things. It also afforded them some cover via the large, broken Red Rocket sign – or at least the R-d –ocke- that remained of the original letters.

Harper tapped out two cigarettes, lighting one and then the other, passing the younger of the two up to her partner. Hancock sucked air in through his teeth as his scarred fingers took the filter from her.

“Thanks, sister,” he spoke around the cigarette, smoke drifting out through the edges of a small smile.

“Take a seat, Hancock. We should let them forget we’re here, then worry about taking them out. Don’t need ‘em figuring out how to scale the walls,” she smiled a little, leaning back on one hand. The ghoul mayor looked down at her for another long moment before he bent at the knees and folded his legs, sitting close but not touching. They sat in silence for a few minutes, taking in deep drags of the stale nicotine before Harper fished out a small tin from her retrofitted backpack. One little purple pill and one little orange pill; she took the purple between two fingers, cigarette switched from between her lips to deposit it on her tongue. She offered the other pill to him with a quirk of her lips. “Story time?”

He grinned at her, smoke drifting from his nose cavity, before he slid his tongue out from between his teeth. Harper snorted and shook her head, setting the tin on her knee before she pinched the pill between two fingers and plopped it gently on his tongue. He rolled it back between his molars and crunched it into dust, lining his mouth with the orange mentat the way she had done with her grape version.

“What’re you in the mood for?” she asked as she settled back on one hand again, resuming sucking on what was left of her cigarette. She could feel the sun’s heat through her cobbled-together armor, sitting up long enough to tug off her General’s hat and drop it to her side. She shrugged out of the long blue coat after peeling back her gloves.

“Looks like you’re in the mood for somethin’ specific,” Hancock barked a brief laugh, black eyes narrowed a little as he watched her unlatch parts of her armor. Eventually, with everything folded and piled to her side, she sat in her boots, pants, and undershirt with everything else easily accessible to her left.

“It’s _hot_ ,” she frowned a little, her cigarette long-since out. She scrabbled for a container of too-warm purified water before she found the pack of cigarettes again. “Anyway. Stories. Let’s see...I haven’t told you about _To Kill a Mockingbird_ , have I?”

“Is that the one with the girl, Scout?"

“Sure is. Hmm. Throw me a bone here, Hancock. Whaddya want?”

“Tell me about you, then, Perry.”

Harper felt the smile tug at the edges of her lips at the nickname so few had ever used. Her sister, Nora, had been the first. Her parents disapproved of it but Nora persisted, although it became more of a secret shared between the two of them than anything. When Nora and Nate Spencer got serious, the army vet was brought in on the secret. In all her life, Hancock was only the third person to call her by the childhood nickname. He hadn’t expressly asked – after she had told one of the stories involving Nora, in which she had referred to herself as ‘Perry’, Hancock had tested it sometime later. He had watched for her reaction and liked what he saw. He didn’t overuse the name but let it roll of his tongue when it seemed to make sense.

“John, I’ve told you all there is to know about me and then some. I can…hmm…why don’t I tell you about my graduate thesis?”

He nodded dumbly, eyes trailing over the lines she made in the blue of the sky behind her. In all honesty, he just wanted her to talk. He really liked listening to the old-world Boston accent slip from her lips, growing more distinct as she grew more excited, more _animated_.

She was young – it wasn’t hard for him to see, especially with the lack of radiation sapping her skin of the elasticity of youth. He wasn’t even sure he could remember being that young – or a lot of what he had done during his youth, anyway. In another time, she’d barely be able to drink. Minus over-two-centuries spent as a Perrycicle, that is.

He listened as she waxed on about robots, engineering, sentience, and more – he watched her lips form the words, her blue eyes narrow as she seemed to be searching the air for part of her memory. It was only a few months removed for her, despite the amount of time that had passed since she had gone into the Vault. Nate had been alive then, although only mostly; with Nora a few months dead as a result of the tumor, Nate was a ghost of his former self. Harper had delayed her return to school so that she could help take care of her nephew, Shaun, while Nate rejoined the land of the living.

A little shy of three months after what would have been the start her final year at CIT, the bombs began to fall. Harper had taken Nora’s spot in the Vault, watched her brother-in-law take a bullet to the head and her baby nephew be pulled away screaming. She had broken her hand against the glass, trying and failing to remove herself from the cryo container. She had never been a strong person physically, or even very big, and the glass did more damage to her knuckles than the other way around.

She could still see the scars on the back of her left hand, even after so many stims and weeks between then and now.

Harper had more or less reiterated the entire premise for her thesis – combined with her plans to improve on the concept of Synths that existed in the Before. Pre-War, they said. She had been involved in the early days at CIT, now the Institute, as a part of her work and school – she had been recruited for a special project, never told the details of the other half. She had been working on the robotics of the body, letting her mind work out how to give the synth a personality. She had taken that opportunity to form her thesis and the concept for her capstone project. She never got that far, but she liked to think she might yet still.

Hancock had long-since forgotten the cigarette dangling from his lips, an elbow on his knee and his hand against his rough palm.

“Shit, sister,” he let out a low whistle, straightening a little and tossing the dead filter to replace it with an unlit cigarette. “You got a big ol’ brain in the pretty little head of yours, huh?”

He didn’t realize what he said until he saw the blush in Harper’s pale, freckled cheeks. It wasn’t in her nature to point out what he said; instead, she smiled shyly and busied herself with lighting another cigarette before she started spouting opinions on the drawbacks to self-learning artificial intelligence. She threw out phrases like ‘reservoir computing’ and ‘backpropagation’, Hancock just nodding a little and sucking air in through his teeth.

He wanted to blame the drugs for the hot tingling sensation that started behind his eyes and trickled down through his ruined body but he knew that wasn’t fair. It was a travesty, almost, to suggest that it was anything other than the girl – _young woman_ at his side causing the uncomfortable strain in his pants. It almost made him want to laugh – he had never really thought talking about robots would get to him like that; then again, pretty much any time he let Harper talk about something that she felt was important or even _interesting_ , it was the same song and dance. ‘Story time’ had been a fairly common occurrence between them; they spent an awful lot of time travelling together and just _together_ when they took a break from the road. It became damn near necessary for Hancock when he realized just how _much_ he appreciated listening to her.

Harper didn’t question it when Hancock asked her to tell him things and, truth be told, it was nice to be able to talk to someone. Just that – to talk to _someone_. Even before waking up in an irradiated, wasteland version of her home she hadn’t had much luck with people. Nora had been her closest friend and, before Nate had crumbled in on himself he had been pretty high up on the list. She always had Codsworth, her wedding present to Nate and Nora after she had finished tweaking the Mister Handy she had gotten while doing an internship at General Atomics. He wasn’t always the best company, though.

Hancock felt right to her, though. She had admittedly been caught off-guard when he had killed Finn upon their first meeting, although appreciative when she regained her wits. He had not been the first ghoul she met – not even the first non-feral one, either.

A woman, Harper didn’t know if she was considered ‘young’ or not, had wandered into Sanctuary only a few days after they had managed to start the reconstruction. She was dressed in the tatters of farming clothing with a hole-riddled hat upon her hairless head.

She looked to be absolutely _covered_ in scar tissue, lips almost nonexistent and no hair, ears, or nose. Her eyes were the brightest green-blue Harper had ever seen. The Vault dweller, clearly identifiable after more than just a glance regardless of the blue body suit with gold ‘111’ emblazoned on the back, stilled beside the beginnings of a generator.

“Hi there,” Harper started, trying to disguise the shake in her voice or the wideness of her shocked eyes. “Can…can I help you?”

The other woman blinked at her before nodded, offering a hand to the smoothskin. She shook it and memorized the roughness of her fingers, at odds with the shiny scar tissue that covered what the would-be engineer could see. “I was wonderin’…do you all take ghouls here? I saw the walls goin’ up as I passed down the road and…I’m awful tired.”

Her voice was raspy and low, like someone that smoked too many cigarettes for far too long, but laced with a sort of fear.

Almost immediately, Harper felt her heart drop into her stomach for her initial reaction and grinned broadly, too-white teeth belonging only in the face of someone pre-War. “We take everybody that can and wants to help, miss. Do you have any particular skills, or do you want us to teach you something?”

“My name’s Olivia. And I…I know my way around some plants, if it helps.”

“I’m Harper, it’s nice to meet you, Olivia. And that sure does help. I’ll show you where we planned the garden and you let me know if you think it’s a good idea, yeah?”

Not everyone was as friendly to Olivia as Harper had been and, despite her generally soft-spoken demeanor, the young woman made it very clear that rudeness wasn’t going to be tolerated. As long as Olivia was doing her part, just like everybody else, she was welcome and would be treated as such. Of course, Harper went at it more from a _please_ aspect and less of a _do this_ one, her gentle demeanor was slowly fading by the time they found themselves on the roof. Whether it was her boost in rank amount the Minutemen or the time she spent with Hancock, she couldn’t rightly say.

Word spread surprisingly quickly throughout the Commonwealth, though; it was fairly well-known that Harper suffered no anti-ghoul sentiments – which had, honestly, morphed into some more _liberal_ suggestions about her proclivities. She did almost _constantly_ have Hancock at her side but she had long-since decided to let people think what they wanted to, even years before the world went to shit.

The Geiger counter on her Pip-Boy, closer to Hancock as he sat on her right side, clicked in frustration. Harper jumped a little before she realized she had been leaning almost against him – and then again when the clap of thunder sounded around them and struck through her.

It wasn’t Hancock causing the spike, it was the oncoming storm.

“Balls,” Harper cursed, gathering up her discarded clothes and armor with the cigarette dangling from the corner of her lips. She scrambled to stand and jerked open the door to the roof’s shed, tossing everything inside of it before she returned to help Hancock. He deposited her General’s hat atop her head with a grin before ushering her back inside the small, mostly-intact shack.

Harper wasn’t, in all truth, particularly _scared_ of thunderstorms or, as it is happened, rad storms. She was a bit on the jumpy side, although every time the thunder cracked and she jerked she would laugh afterward. Hancock’s grin grew each time, until the Geiger counter’s ticking became fairly insistent on a green tinge began to show on her face in the relative darkness of the small space they shared.

“You okay over there, sister?” Hancock asked from where he rested against a small hole at the base of the building. He may or may not have found that specific spot in an effort to keep any more radiation from finding her.

She smiled queasily and nodded. “Yeah, I think it’s just the rads. I’ll take something when the storm ends, unless it gets too bad. I’ve always been jumpy with storms. Nora used to read to me, up until she moved out. Sometimes, after, she’d even call to do it.” Harper let out a laugh at the memory, shaking her head a little. “She always knew when I needed something. She’d call me almost every day when I moved into the dorms at CIT to make sure I was eating. I would forget a lot.”

“I’ve noticed. You get a singular focus and you forget about…well, you. Hell, I thought _you_ had gone feral when you were trying to work out what had happened to the water purifier at the old drive-in. Between the rads there in the middle and you not eating for…what, two days? Not much scares a zombie king like me, but I gotta say, you had me going there for a minute.”

Harper narrowed her blue eyes a little in concentration across the small space between them, huddled in the middle of the room in an effort to insulate herself as best as she could. Using her leg muscles, she pulled herself closer across the dusty floor and put a hand on Hancock’s, which rested on his bent and raised knee. “I do a lot of dumb shit, John. Thanks for…you know. Just thanks, I guess.”

He let out a sort of nervous laugh, rubbing one ruined hand over his equally scarred cheek. The hand beneath hers itched with the feeling of her smooth skin. It wasn’t like he’d never touched a regular ol’ human since his ghoulification, although not many of them to be honest. It wasn’t like he never touched her, either, although it was rarely skin-to-scarred-skin. There was something about the fact that he still had half of an erection caused by her stretching the front of his pants, beneath the sash of the old American flag, and the look in her eyes that made him feel some type of way he couldn’t describe.

“Yeah, well, you ain’t done nothin’ dumb enough to compete with this ugly mug, have ya?” he grinned, trying to dispel the feeling bubbling up in his chest. To his disappointment, Harper’s face fell a little.

“I wish you wouldn’t say things like that,” she sighed a little, curving her fingers around his palm and squeezing gently. “You’re no zombie and you’re not ugly, John.”

He guffawed a little and, if he could still blush he probably would’ve. Beneath the glasses she wore and the slightly matted deep brown hair that surrounded her head like a halo of near-black, she was a pretty girl. She wasn’t filled out the way a lot of the women in what remained of the pre-War mags were, but that didn’t matter much to Hancock. Hell, he even liked her glasses.

 _Shit_ , he thought as the realization that he had been avoiding for weeks dawned on him.

“You know what, Perry? You may do dumb shit, but you’re a whole lot of good. You’re too kind for this world. I didn’t think you’d last a day, the big-eyed way you looked at me after I took care of Finn. But you just keep surprisin’ the hell outta me.”

Harper let out a squeaky sort of laugh, mostly nerves but a little appreciation and a whole lot of amusement. “Can I tell you a secret, Hancock? _I_ didn’t think I’d last a day after I stepped out of the Vault. Everything’s gone to shit, at least from what I knew it to be. If Nate hadn’t taught me how to shoot a pistol when I started college, I really doubt I would’ve even made it to the surface.”

“Look at you now. You can snipe better than that Railroad fellow.”

“You mean Deacon?” Harper raised an eyebrow at him and suppressed a laugh when he grimaced along with his nod. “Someday you’ll have to tell me about all of that. And I don’t think I’m quite that good, but learning to shoot at a distance is really what’s keeping me alive. And you, of course. I can’t even imagine where I’d be if you hadn’t wanted to come with me, John.”

“No use worryin’ over it, sister. You’re…well, you’re a good friend. One of my better ideas, tagging along to make sure you keep your head off the choppin’ block.”

“Friend, huh?” Harper repeated with a quirk to the edge of her lips. Sliding her hand back into her lap, she took a moment to find the mixture of RadAway, Rad-X, and purified water she had concocted. She liked to mess around with chems, see what she could do with them. She thought there was a lot of untapped potential being wasted and watching her work was another one of those things that made Hancock’s body, well _tingle_. Swigging some of the mixture, she made a face before she found and lit two more cigarettes. “Okay, well, I just thought of another story to tell you. It was one of Nora’s favorites. It’s called _Emma_. Do you remember _Pride and Prejudice_?” Hancock nodded. “Okay, so Jane Austen wrote _Emma_ too. Let me see, where to start…”

Harper couldn’t recall the novels word for word, but she could paint the pictures well enough for Hancock to follow. She often interjected her own opinions on how the people interacted, how silly they were being, or why something was infuriating. She would take time to point out literary devices that Jane Austen used to explore different facets of the story and the characters amidst the story and, all the while, John listened completely enraptured.

By the time she had finished her concoction, the story, and half a pack of cigarettes more the storm had died away. Hancock didn’t think standing any time soon would be a particularly good idea, how matter how polite Harper was more often than not. He thought she would be hard-pressed not to notice the sizable bulge in the front of his trousers as she finished the story of friends-to-lovers and didn’t want to put her into the awkward situation of trying to figure out why it was there.

This had been a growing issue for some time. He wasn’t certain if she was entirely uninterested, totally oblivious, or just painfully shy. He wasn’t exactly overt, but he wasn’t necessarily hiding it very well – he slipped up more and more lately, saying distractingly nice things without a second thought.

Offering a second round of mentats, just the plain stuff this time, Harper grinned at him. “I know how much you like these. They’re my favorite too, although the orange ones taste the best.”

“You tryin’ to butter me up for something devious?” he grinned around the dissolving pill in his mouth, the place where his eyebrows once lived raising up in curiosity as he watched her throw her sniper over her shoulder and grab her chest plate from where it sat. He waited as long as he could before he stood to follow, knowing the visual evidence of his lust had only barely dissipated.

Maybe it was the drugs, or maybe it was just travelling with her so much – but the flush of color was unmistakable as they re-emerged into the sun’s descent, setting fire to the skyline. She turned to look at him, lit from the back by the sunset, and he sucked in a breath at the sight of it. Maybe it was the drugs, or maybe it was just the desperation thrumming in his chest. He didn’t know and he didn’t really want to own up to the second one, so he covered it all with a cool smile and continued to follow her towards the remnants of the gas station’s sign.

“You think there’s a way back from this?” she asked she set down the chest plate, the back of the armor spread open to her side for Hancock to lean into. It would have them shoulder-to-shoulder, the sides of their body aligned. Lying on his stomach was about to be _incredibly_ uncomfortable.

“You mean going feral?” he asked, resting on his elbows. He propped his legs up with his toes, hoping to keep some pressure off of his hips until he found a more comfortable way to position himself on the rough roof.

“Yeah. I just feel like…it’s not right, you know? I don’t _want_ to kill them. Yeah, sure, they’d just as soon kill me as look at me but it’s not really their fault, is it?”

Hancock looked at her with a shocked expression; he knew she took ‘protect the innocent’ very, _very_ seriously but she had no idea just how far that idea stretched in her mind. He became swallowed up in looking at her, eyes scanning her profile. He found himself counting the freckles on her right cheek.

“You all right there, John?” she asked, turning her head to look at him with a quirk of her lips. “Commonwealth to John?”

He startled a little and coughed quietly, propping himself on one arm so that he could reach for the nearest pack of cigarettes and his lighter. He offered her one after lighting his and she craned her neck to take it from between his fingers. The brush of the soft skin on her face against his fingers made him shiver.

“You sure you’re okay?” she frowned, lifting a hand to tuck her hair behind her ear. “You need anything? Water? Food? Jet?”

Hancock let out a laugh and she smiled a little, hesitantly at first before it bloomed into a full-fledged grin. “I’m good, sister. You got any ideas on how to avoid making ‘em target practice, then?”

Harper sucked in a breath through her teeth, cigarette held aloft briefly as she leaned to look through her computerized scope. “If I could distract them? Pull their attention away from us long enough to let us get outta here…but what about the next poor sod that comes this way?” She groaned, turning her head back towards him. With little effort, she rested her forehead on his shoulder. Hancock froze at the contact but she was too distracted with her thoughts to consider it. “I don’t know what to do, John,” she sighed in the space below her face, hot breath soaked up through the sleeve of his red frock coat.

“Hey, Perry,” he started and she lifted her face, blue eyes rimmed in red and tears. “We’re not doing it for sport. We’re not doing it because they’re ferals. We’re doing it because if we don’t, we could die. Others could die. It’s not that you _want_ them dead, ya feel me? Yeah, it’s not really _their_ fault that they are the way they are, and there aren’t many you can say that about…but, they’re still dangerous. So we’ll take care of them to save the next person the trouble.”

She looked at him for a long moment, considering a thing or two before she nodded and looked back into her scope. “Okay,” she breathed, preparing herself. She considered her options before she sat back again. “I have a few grenades. We can toss them, then hold back again. We can come back out when they’ve settled down again to take out the rest of them.”

Hancock nodded and gathered up their things, standing at her side as she pulled the pins on two small frag grenades, tossing one and pulling the pin on the second before tossing it to another small group that had amassed. He swooped his arms around her and held her with his back to where the explosion boomed on the ground below. They stood still, Hancock wrapped around her, breathing heavily as if they had had to run for their safety.

Harper froze in his arms before she turned slightly, Hancock moving away a little before she caught him by the wrist. In a flurry of movement, she pulled him to her and wrapped her arms around his middle, burying her face in the collar of his shirt. He hesitated briefly before he mirrored her move and held her body close to his, breath ruffling the top of her hair as his chin rested against her hair.

“It feels like it has been a million years since someone hugged me,” she murmured against the fabric that protected his skin from her touch. “I had forgotten how much…” Sighing, she shook her head as she pulled back – although not completely, sliding one hand down to lace her fingers with his. She pulled him gently back towards the shack, where they would wait out the frenzy down below. With the door shut and her Pip-Boy flashlight set in the corner to make up for what sunlight couldn’t make it in, Harper took his hand again.

“You okay?” he asked, mostly to cover up how much this new-found closeness was affecting him.

“John…Do I make you uncomfortable?” it was clear to him that she had been beginning to say something else entirely but had derailed when her eyes shifted to the lines of his face.

He shook his head, swallowing audibly. A spasm in his hand clenched his fingers a little tighter around hers and she smiled, just a little.

Her other hand, her left, lifted to the air between them. He was only a few inches taller than she was, her forehead coming up to where his nose used to be. Her hand shook a little and the one edge of his lips quirked. “Do I scare you, sunshine?”

“No,” she answered quickly, eyes moving from her fingers to his. The resolute look in her eyes assured him that she was telling the truth. “And yes. But not for the reasons you think, John Hancock. The last time I felt this safe with someone, both of them ended up dead. But I don’t… I don’t want to talk about Nate or Nora.” She held her fingers aloft, watching his face. “Can I touch you?”

“Don’t know why you want to,” he shrugged, trying to play it off like a self-deprecating joke when in reality it was just self-deprecating. “Yeah, sure.”

When the soft pads of her fingers, calloused more now than they had been but still miles softer than that of anyone he’d met, made first contact with the leathery texture of his jawline they both let their breaths out in a sigh. Harper, who had been looking at her hand, shifted her gaze immediately to his – she found that his eyes had closed. She made sure that there was no hint of pain in his features before she smiled and laid her hand flat against his cheek, thumb stroking the bone below his eye. This had him looking at her again as he lifted the hand still joined with his, depositing it on his chest before he slid his to her lower back and pulled her a little closer. He didn’t drop his arm then, instead looped his other to join it as he held her gently.

“You’re something else, you know that?” he murmured, black eyes half-lidded as her left hand remained warm against his face while her right found its way to the side of his neck.

“Good something else?” she asked with a quirk of her lips as she pressed her body closer.

“The _best_ ,” he smirked, leaning down just a little closer. “Harper…I gotta tell you something, though."

Her smiled wavered slightly and she pulled back a little, her hands both falling to splay across his covered chest. “I’m sorry, I-”

“Now don’t you go apologizing to me,” he pressed his hands into her back to keep her close, hoping his guess was correct. She didn’t struggle against him, which made him feel like it probably was. “Listen for a sec, sunshine. I’ve done a lot of boneheaded shit in my life, but not telling you how I feel might be the worst yet. So…Harper, I think you are _the greatest_ thing that has ever happened to me and I can’t go fuckin’ it up just for a good time, ya dig? So. There’s nothin’ in this world I want more in this moment than to kiss you, but you gotta tell me if that’s going to go and ruin what we got. ‘Cause I’m not about to lose it.”


End file.
